Emails Point to Ben Rhodes as Key to Benghazi Talking Points

A year ago, Ed Lasky of the American Thinker speculated that White House security official Ben Rhodes – a speechwriter with no prior national security experience or expertise – was at the heart of the Benghazi scandal, specifically the false talking points spouted on Sunday news shows by former UN Ambassador (now National Security Advisor) Susan Rice that the Sep. 11, 2012 attack was a protest against a YouTube video.

Now, those speculations seem to have been confirmed by the release of a batch of emails obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Lasky quotes the emails, which pinpoint Rhodes as conducting a “prep” session for Rice on the Friday night before her Sunday morning media tour, with the goal “To underscore that these protests are rooted in [an] Internet video, and not a broader failure [of] policy.”

In 2013, Lasky reminded readers that Politico‘s Carol Lee had once described Rhodes as “one of the obscure guys who wrote Obama’s campaign speeches in Starbucks and played video games into the early morning hours.” After his mysterious elevation within the administration, “Now he attends national security meetings and takes writer’s refuge in a secret office on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.”

Today, Lasky notes that Rhodes’s brother heads CBS News, which recently lost reporter Sharyl Attkisson – at least partly, she alleges, because the network did not like her reporting on Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals, including Operation Fast & Furious. Rhodes, Lasky says, “will do his boss’s bidding, hiding information, manipulating the facts, distract people: the truth and the American people be damned.”